Let's Play
Portfolio
[Luc Devoldere]
How have painters captured play in paint? There is of course the inevitable Brueghel (c. 1525-30 - 1569), who portrays dozens of children's games as one swirling round dance which leaves one wondering whether it is light-hearted or agitated.
Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) does the opposite: tennis may have been an elegant pastime and a badge of distinction for the upper classes of the fin de siècle, but it does nothing to bring these women together. They remain isolated in their boredom.
Then the luminist Emile Claus (1849-1924) shows us a half-frozen boy on the ice in the warm winter light: here the play seems to be an innocent pleasure that has just ended. Jozef Israëls (1824-1911) does something different again: children gazing in fascination at a little sailing-boat floating in a pool on the beach. On the horizon a sailing-boat floats on the real sea. What is play? What is reality? But the play may be more real than it looks.
In his cockfight in Flanders Rémy Cogghe (1854-1935) bluntly confronts us with the passion of the spectator: bourgeois and working man are united around the arena where the duel to the death is taking place.
Gustave De Smet (1877-1945) portrays in angular outlines card and darts players, two very different forms of play which met in the Flemish café and decided to stay together. We have come a very long way now from the elegant pastime casually demonstrated by ladies and gentlemen in their fine interiors, as in the card-game set down by Eglon Hendrick van der Neer (1634?-1703) almost three centuries before.
Raoul De Keyser (1930) is fascinated by the lines that ritually separate the field of play from the outside world, and Carel Willink (1900-1983) tries to capture the essence of the young girl posing proudly with her ball: she is one with her game, which is just beginning.